Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day019.17
Last-Modified: 2000/07/24
Q. Well, go to the next book then, "Nuremberg, the Last
Battle", where once again you find fault with my selection
of illustrations, although on this occasion I have
included victims of what can loosely be called the
Holocaust. I have obtained from a German sale an original
soldier's album from the Balkans showing these German
soldiers brutally stringing up obviously defenceless
civilians and hanging them. They are the most brutal
photographs I have ever seen. They are nightmare
photographs. Yet here too you find fault with what I have
done.
A. Let me just read your captions: "Punished",
headline, "... snapshots from a German soldier's photo
album. The daily routine of a cruel warfare in the
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Balkans. A German soldier is found mutilated. The German
troops take reprisals stringing up the men folk in the
village like washing on a line. One by one, a chair
kicked away ... (reading to the words) ... and then
painful death by strangulation. For crimes like these,
German Generals are executed at Nuremberg ..."
Second heading: "And unpunished. No Allied
General is ever called to account for the appalling fire
raids on Japan, above, or Dresden, left and below. In
each of these 1945 raids about 100,000 innocent civilians
are burned alive", and we know that that is a grossly
exaggerated figure, "in what is now only universally
recognised as a crime against international law" which
I do not believe it is.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: We will leave that one -- we will not chase
that one.
MR IRVING: Professor, you are not an expert on international
law. I have a lot of evidence that it is, my Lord, but I
am not going to put it to the court.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: We will not chase that one. I think it is
not the point.
MR IRVING: Yes, but on the photographs here again, it seems I
just cannot do right. My Lord, you do not have the
photographs in front of you, do you?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: No, but I think this is not an
unimportant
point, I think I can get them quite easily. I know
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exactly the ones that are being referred to.
MR IRVING: Yes. It is a whole page of photographs,
snapshots
from a soldier's album showing the reprisals they have
taken against these people in a Balkan village.
A. Yes, you do make it clear that they are reprisals for
what
you call the mutilation of a German soldier.
Q. And I do have to admit that I have not published the
most
gruesome photographs for obvious reasons of taste.
A. That did not stop you publishing the photographs of
the
victims of the Hamburg bombing raid.
Q. Believe me, the ones that I did not publish in the
Nuremberg book were unpublishable.
A. What I am trying to establish here is that you are
trying
to set up an equivalence between the two sides in
order to
diminish the importance of the Nazi extermination of
the
Jews.
Q. If an author has ----
A. And, indeed, I mean, in some sense, I think these
captions
and illustrations do have the effect of suggesting
that
what the Allies did was worse than what the Germans
did.
Q. Worse?
A. Yes.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Because they got away with it scott-free.
MR IRVING: If an author has sincerely held views ----
A. And because the pictures are more -- have larger
numbers,
more gruesome, and so on.
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Q. If an author has sincerely held views on the morality
of
what both sides did in World War II, by way of killing
innocent people and civilians, is this grounds for him
to
be held up to public ridicule and opprobrium and
obloquy?
A. This is systematic distortion, I think, in your
presentation of these pictures, the selection that you
make.
Q. Is not the systematic distortion that practised by
those
who have suppressed the evidence of crimes that the
Allies
committed during World War II? I do not really want
to go
far down this particular road, his Lordship will not
allow
us.
A. I am not here to defend the bombing of Dresden and the
bombing of Hamburg, goodness knows. I do not think
that
these have been suppressed at all. There has been an
enormous amount of debate and discussion about these
and
passionately argued on both sides.
Q. What about an author's right to write about it if he
has
these views sincerely, can he do so without fear ----
A. I think an author has ----
Q. --- of being labelled a Holocaust denier?
A. Well, I think an author has a view to try to maintain
a
certain balance when talking about the atrocities, to
use
that word, committed on both sides.
Q. Yes.
A. And I do not think you do that.
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Q. Have I not had a record ever since my very first book
of speaking out against this kind of air warfare right
up
to the present day in Kosovo, and does this not
entitle me
to adopt a kind of moral equivalency between the two
crimes, although, obviously, there is no comparison on
scale?
A. Yes, but what you are doing is to try to establish,
both
in terms of numbers as I am arguing in this action and
in
terms of the atrocities, the impression to your
readership
and your audience that the allied bombing of German
cities
was as bad as or worse than the Nazi killing of Jews
in
Auschwitz and elsewhere. That is really what this is
about.
Q. In a few pages' time you say, "On one particular night
we
only killed 17,000 people by burning them alive in 20
minutes", is that right?
A. Could you point me to that passage?
Q. Page 114.
A. Yes.
Q. Line 5, you are suggesting that killing 17,600 people
by
burning them alive in the space of 20 minutes is in
some
way, I do not know, not a crime?
A. No. What I say here is that ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Read it out, would you, Professor Evans,
since that suggestion is being put?
A. Yes, I will read that out, yes. This refers back to a
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lengthy quote on the previous page where you talk
about
25,000 people being killed in 25 minutes in Pforzheim
by
an allied air raid in 25 minutes, and in Auschwitz
there
were 25,000 killed in four years. "When you put
things
into perspective like that, it diminishes their
Holocaust
- that word with a capital letter", "their" meaning ,
presumably, the Jews.
I point out in the passage that you cite
that
your equivalence does not stand up to examination,
quite
apart from the gross minimization of the Auschwitz
figures
because you exaggerate the number of deaths caused by
the
Pforzheim raid, which was estimated in a report of the
Statistical Office of the City of Pforzheim in 1954
not as
25,000 or 27,000, as you claim, but as 17,600. So you
are
deliberately trying to say 25,000, 25,000, and, in
fact,
it is not that equivalence at all.
That does not mean to say that I justify the
bombing of Pforzheim; that does not come into it at
all.
I am simply trying to talk about the way that you
present
these things.
MR IRVING: Can we just go back to Nuremberg, please? You
suggest that at the end of paragraph 8 on page 110
that
the way I juxtaposed those photographs was intended to
imply to the careless reader that the perpetrators of
the
atrocities were Jews, that the atrocities were
committed
by Jews and that they were getting their -- is there
any
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justification at all for this suggestion?
A. Yes. It seems to me that that is what seems to be the
suggestion.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think I had better have a look at that.
MR IRVING: I think your Lordship ought to have a look at
it
because it is a serious allegation.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I could not find the photographs.
MR RAMPTON: My Lord ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY: It is between 182 and 183.
MR RAMPTON: In Nuremberg it is after 182.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I follow that. Where does it come in the
great wodge of photographs?
MR RAMPTON: It is after a panorama of Nuremberg Defendants
with somebody or other giving a -- Robert H Jackson
giving
a speech for the Prosecution, I think.
MR IRVING: I will have the actual book brought tomorrow,
your
Lordship.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Rampton has it; I may have to look at
it
because I have a slight feeling that ----
MR RAMPTON: It is worth looking at the original actually,
if
I may suggest it?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have a feeling the photograph has not
for
some reason found its way into my ----
MR RAMPTON: I think the witness should have it too.
MR IRVING: Again the quality of the photographs is
remarkable. They are original colour photographs to
the
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Nuremberg trials and this is the standard I am going
for.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: That is not really the point, is it?
MR IRVING: Well, it is the basis I make the selection of
books
that I publish.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Actually, I would rather look at the
original. Well, the point that Professor Evans is
making
is, obviously, in reference to the photograph on the
left-hand side under the text and they do have a
Jewish
appearance.
MR IRVING: Undoubtedly, they are Jews. Undoubtedly, they
are
also being swept up into the general Holocaust on that
site. But I think to suggest that by the
juxtaposition of
the photographs I had implied in any way at all that
they
were guilty for whatever had befallen the German
troops or
whatever, that is perverse and unjustified and
certainly
unintentional on my part.
A. Well the caption does say: "A German soldier is found
mutilated. The German troops take reprisals".
Q. Yes. But, as you know, the reprisal is just swept up,
a
round number of males in the area and liquidated them,
murdered them?
A. It is a question of what the captions and the pictures
suggest.
Q. But nowhere is it suggested in the caption that the
Jewish
victims on those pictures have been picked for that
reason?
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A. No, it is a matter of suggestion really. It was what
the
pictures suggest. I mean, of their very nature
pictures
are suggestive, captions are short. As you say, they
are
very powerful -- worth a thousand words.
Q. To summarise, before we move on, this is a page of
photographs of victims of the Nazis, is that right?
A. I believe I say so, yes.
Q. So that your suggestion in the previous book that I do
not
publish photographs of the victims of the Nazis does
not
always hold up?
A. Well, I say you -- in the previous book I mention that
you
have a picture of the train at Riga. That is the only
picture of the Nazis' Jewish victims to set aside
several
extremely graphic pictures of the victims of allied
bombing raids.
Q. So, somebody who is minimizing something like that in
their books is a Holocaust denier, is that part of the
element?
A. What you are trying to do -- all of this is about your
attempt to establish an equivalence between the two,
as it
were, to suggest that essentially all sides in the
Second
World War committed crimes of some dimensions. That
is
what we are really talking about. I think that is an
element in Holocaust denial.
Q. In Sir Winston Churchill's books, were there any
photographs at all of train loads of Jews at Riga or
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anywhere else on his History of the Second World War,
six
volumes?
A. I do not recall. I am not sure I see the relevance of
that in any case to what you do in your books.
Q. That is for his Lordship to decide. If someone like
Sir
Winston Churchill writes a six-volume history without
mentioning the Holocaust or the killing of Jews in
seven
line, does that make him a Holocaust denier or does it
mean times have now changed?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I think we can do better than take time
with
that question.
MR IRVING: We can indeed, my Lord, we are now going to
come to
a little piece of gold on page 111. In paragraph 10
you
accuse me once again of exaggerating the numbers
killed in
allied bombing raids. The number of Germans killed in
allied bombing raids, is that correct?
A. Yes, that is right.
Q. But you do not distort documents or quotations in
order to
justify that kind of allegation?
A. I am not sure what you are referring to here.
Q. All will shortly become plain. Will you go to the
next
paragraph 111?
A. Yes.
Q. Here you say on page 441 of Goebbels: "He describes
the
numbers of those killed in the bombing raid on Hamburg
on
27, 26, 28 July 1943 as 'nearly 50,000'".
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A. Yes.
Q. That was the big fire storm, was it not, that summer?
A. Yes, that is right.
Q. Operation Gomorrah, the British call it?
A. Yes, it is 48,000 in the captions of Hitler's War which
I cite on page 109.

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